[HN Gopher] Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support deve... ___________________________________________________________________ Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community Author : gk1 Score : 259 points Date : 2021-11-08 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.mooreds.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.mooreds.com) | 1cvmask wrote: | Whats the best forum software out there? | mooreds wrote: | We use nodebb and find it pretty good from a UX/functionality | perspective. | mmcclure wrote: | I think "less capable moderation tools" is really underselling | how purposefully useless and nonexistent Slack's moderation tools | are for open communities. I cannot overstate how terrible Slack | is in this regard. | | To be clear, I really and truly don't fault them for this: | Slack's always been clear that their focus is on business | communication, which is a totally different animal when it comes | to moderation needs. Discord is nearly infinitely better in the | sense that they have any tooling at all, but it's still | considerably far behind the resources I've got when moderating a | large Discourse instance. | mattbk1 wrote: | I understand your pain. Even simple things like moving posts | from one channel to another aren't possible for an admin to do | in Slack, although this has been basic forum functionality | since...ever? | techsin101 wrote: | better idea, an easier way to convert certain conversations into | forum post. | mooreds wrote: | I built a zap to store off slack conversations to google sheets | (for a slack I joined a few years ago, where I would also | notify the user I was going to do this). | | But yes, an automated solution would be great. | | Still doesn't deal with question quality though. When I am | writing a forum question, I spend more time making it a good | post than when I just toss out a slack q. | stormbrew wrote: | I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. | They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for | me over the course of my internet life because: | | - The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I | helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that | codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, | stored passwords in plaintext in the database. | | - The people who want to have the forum rarely have the tech | skills to keep up to date on security issues, let alone keep the | software up to date. | | - There are 'forum as a service' sites but they inevitably become | essentially ad spam platforms that are intolerable to use. | | So you can do this, and I might even benefit from it showing up | in google searches, but I'd actually still be way more likely to | _use_ discord if I have a question. | | Also, I reject the idea that there even is a strict dichotomy | between "synchronous" and "asynchronous" communication systems. | If anything, you can always do what's usually described as async | on a synchronous platform but you can't really do the opposite, | so they're a superset/subset pair to me. | | I don't care if the maintainer takes 2 days to get back to me on | discord but at least if they do I get a notification and I don't | have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they | have or not. | lategloriousgnu wrote: | What PII are you putting on a forum? All I can think of is | email and password. Your password should be unique to the | forum, and I would hardly say that an email address is PII. If | you're super worried about email, just use an alias. | unethical_ban wrote: | If you're putting PII on a random forum, that's your problem, | respectfully. I have a specific email account for "random | forums" and don't put real info in my account. | | I disagree that random forums are spam-fests. That is purely a | matter of moderation and user activity. Overclock.net and | bronco6g.com are two (non-reddit) forums I can think of that | I've been to recently, and neither have a large amount of spam | posts. | | You can set up email notifications to thread replies in most | forum software, so you don't have to actively check if you | don't want to. | | Finally, I reject the notion that you can _effectively_ search | through years and years of discord or slack chat for topics | related to your question. The nature of creating a thread | differentiates itself from a "random" post. Perhaps if | Discord/Slack's UI prompted a person to label a post | "conversation starter" or "thread starter" then it would be | better organized. | kobieyc wrote: | what you said | | slack doesn't have categories and tags and some search terms | in slack bring up too many results without context to be | useful | KennyBlanken wrote: | > I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums | anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of | breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life | | Why were you putting PIID on web forums? Why weren't you using | a unique password? | | > I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to | check if they have or not. | | Discord is a nightmare. Someone mentions you in a busy channel, | 6 hours ago? Try to find it. Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no | "skip to where I was mentioned" feature. | | You're forced to use a (visible to everyone) unique identifier | across every discord server, ripe for doxxing or stalking | people. Targeting someone's account is attractive because their | single login gets you into every server they're part of. | | Their implementation of threading sucks. They rolled it out | with little warning to server mods/admins and it caught nearly | everyone off guard, with users going hog wild creating threads | because it was a way to get something like "joesuckscocks" into | the channel list. The icing on the cake was that threads | created before the ACLs were rolled out couldn't be removed by | server admins and mods, so they had to go around begging users | to delete them. | | Every server I belong to, I've had to spend a minute or two | making sure I disable all the by-default-on notifications | because people abuse the shit out of @everyone, @here, etc; | some server admins even abuse roles to push a notification to | everyone (ie, they'll create a role everyone is added to, and | then spam it with mentions.) | | Discord has done little to address problems like server raids | and trolls targeting LGBTQ/PoC groups, 'rivals' to their | favorite streamers, you name it. They've shrugged and said "we | don't have the staff to do it", yet they have estimated profits | around $130M/year. As a result people have had to add all sorts | of bots to deal with the problem, and nobody has any idea what | all these bots are doing with all the chat logs people share. | | There's so much fragmentation, too. I play a not-very-popular | tactical shooter game and the number of servers I've been added | to and have to keep track of is crazy because everyone creates | their own server. | | Oh, and last but not least: tencent has a significant | investment in them. | the_only_law wrote: | > Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no "skip to where I was | mentioned" feature. | | You'll have to excuse the HN pendantics, but it does. In iOS | app, for example, open the left draw and there's a navigation | tab on the bottom. There's a mentions tab that will show you | a list of mentions (that is replies and pings) and tapping on | one takes you to that message. | [deleted] | dijit wrote: | It's not extremely hard to set up SSO with the big (tech) | providers like GitHub and Google. | | Would you be cool with "log in with google"? | MrPatan wrote: | Cool as a cucumber that has been cut off from every single | account they have the moment somebody at Google (or an | algorithm) doesn't like you. Good luck! | secondcoming wrote: | What to do when Goog closes your account and won't reinstate | it? | simonbarker87 wrote: | I raised this in a comment here a few months ago, so much | information that would reduce support burdens is buried in slacks | and discords. It can't be found through Google, it's hard to find | information in the apps if you do manage to get in and then if | they aren't paying for the storage it all disappears after a few | thousand messages anyway. Infuriating. | lux wrote: | I loathe Discord for (non-dev but still software-related) | community management but we tried launching a forum and realized | users don't care and just want Discord or Slack. It's now in the | "familiar" zone and registering for a forum sucks. They don't | care that it's hard to find answers, or any of the other reasons | listed here, many of which were our motivation for starting a | forum. We ended up dividing users and now have a dead forum with | a banner directing people to our Discord :P | lux wrote: | I wonder if this is also part of the preference for Discord, | but all of our most active/longtime users tend to prefer DMing | us over posting publicly. We should probably discourage that so | the community seems more active, but it probably lets them feel | like they can speak more freely. | jedberg wrote: | Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up: | | I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They | required that users be verified, which requires you to give you | phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, | which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because | they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any | other way to verify my identity. | | They told me, "Just use a friend's phone to verify. As long as | they don't try to verify on Discord in six months it should be | fine, we won't check again". | | Their official answer to identity verification was to impersonate | someone else! | errantspark wrote: | I constantly run into this problem, I've used my google voice | number for everything for years (yeah it's not a great move but | very hard to migrate away from) and a frustrating number of | services recently have been rejecting it for verification. I | end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my | PinePhone. It's such a hassle. This whole "you're not a human | unless you have a phone number" thing sucks. Same thing with | having a credit score. You're just assumed to participate in | these systems even though there's no mandate to do so or | protection for you if you don't. | giancarlostoro wrote: | Wait what? You literally put a sim card into a phone for it | to be treated as a cell number? Thats odd and interesting to | me how does that work? | jedberg wrote: | The SIM has its own phone number, so when they put it in a | phone they can do "phone" things like make calls. In their | laptop it's just for data. | johnchristopher wrote: | I don't understand, isn't that how SIM cards are supposed | to work ? | jedberg wrote: | Yeah same. ETrade recently changed their phone verification | system and can no longer send me a text message to verify my | identity. I'm actually ok with that because it forces them to | use the security token instead, which they should be doing | anyway! | | And often I'll run into problems with silently failed | messages because they don't accept the number. | jetpackjoe wrote: | sounds like they are more interested in keeping bots out than | verifying identity | jedberg wrote: | Quite possibly, but they should still have an alternative | other than "impersonate someone else". | blibble wrote: | every time I sign in at asks me to input my university email | address | | I cancel it then it comes back next time | | I'm in my 30s... | ascar wrote: | I don't think it's really about identification. Binding user | accounts to SIM-based phone numbers is an effective way of | limiting account creation as it's effectively binding it to a | physical token. | | I can only guess why Discord wants to do this (fighting scam | bots?), but for example for Tinder this is a very effective way | of preventing abuse on the huge early discovery boost after | signup or long inactivity. | jedberg wrote: | I understand why they do it, and I have no problem with that. | My problem is their lack of an alternative. Either have an | alternative way for me to verify, or a way for an admin to | let me into their channel without verification. | ejj28 wrote: | Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who's | been part of large Discord communities will know that spambots | that DM users with all kinds of scams are a huge issue. Phone | verification stops someone from raiding a server with it | enabled with hundreds of bot accounts. As for VOIP numbers not | being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are | extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat the | whole purpose of phone verification. | | Personally I think that giving server admins the ability to | require phone verification is a good thing. It's not mandatory | and it's only used if the server admin enables it. I don't | think it's fair to blame Discord when it's a choice made by the | server admin, plus a forum could have the same requirement. | PeterCorless wrote: | If they allow the user a chance to send an appeal or out-of- | band alternative method to verify then this becomes less of | an issue. It's when people presume certain baselines -- like | a phone number -- that it becomes a showstopper to community. | jedberg wrote: | My problem isn't with the phone verification. I totally | understand why they do that. I don't even have a problem with | not accepting VOIP. I get why they do that too. | | My problem is that they don't have an alternative, and there | is no way for channel admins that turn on that feature to | know how many people can't get in because of their choice. | | They should either have an alternative way to verify oneself, | or a way for the channel admin to allow you in without the | verification, or both. | ejj28 wrote: | Definitely, I agree that phone numbers are a flawed | verification method. Something better needs to be created, | but I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the same | or different flaws. | giancarlostoro wrote: | There's a bot that will ban most of those spam bots called | Beemo. You realize a lot of bots are verified right? I've | seen scripts to verify accounts on GitHub and spoken to the | kinds of people who would automate accounts via scripts just | to have a bunch of alts. They get numerous alts into servers | just to spy. Its a kind of art I guess. I wouldn't recommend | doing any of these things. | | Personally I just wish Discord wouldnt rate limit bans if | they're not going to make a true effort to catch these bot | farms. Gee I wonder how likely it is that three thousand | accounts will decide to join the same exact server at the | exact same minute? Having modded a decent (tens of thousands) | sized Guild I gotta say people pop in every few minutes or | seconds. Unless something big and relevant to your server | happens that draws more traffic, but even then never | thousands in seconds. | aledalgrande wrote: | Discord, Slack, Gitter all gate messages so much, they are not | well indexed but search engines (if indexed at all) and very | chaotic when a lot of people are posting. | | Please use something like Github discussions. | danr4 wrote: | As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem | is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. | imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in | slack/discord. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033 | jcelerier wrote: | Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to | the phpbb and vBulletin of yore | nerdponx wrote: | An interface like PHPBB or vBulletin, combined with the | Markdown formatting + live preview and tagging/search of | Discourse, would be ideal for me. | syshum wrote: | I still prefer phpbb and vbulletin to slack and discord... | Oddskar wrote: | In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better. | jazzyjackson wrote: | discoverability | | answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let | alone archived) by search engines | Oddskar wrote: | Yeah but that isn't the case for Discourse | NikolaeVarius wrote: | I know of roughly 0 ways discourse is better. Its slower | and has vastly less information density | simias wrote: | I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more | of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super | clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only | because of the lack of proper threading. | | Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought. | Zababa wrote: | Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow | loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything, | even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data. | int_19h wrote: | On the desktop, it also hijacks standard browser | shortcuts such as Ctrl+F. | mthld wrote: | Do you already know Flarum? If so, did you tried it? | | https://flarum.org | majormajor wrote: | The SBNation article commenting system, introduced like ten | years ago now, had a nice take on this. Nested conversations | like HN, but with live updating as new comments came in, and | tracking of read-vs-unread, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate | posts. | | That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front | page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be | nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also | online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for | when viewing later. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | I think Discourse is the first real attempt to bring forums in- | line with "modern" UI expectations, which is why it feels like | it won. There's probably lots of room to grow here. There's | forums out there that allow SMTP-only [1] or SMTP and NNTP | reading/posting [2], there's forum skins atop mailing lists | like [3], there's distributed forums like Aether or Lemmy like | [4, 5]. Unfortunately these are all new/raw. | | [1]: https://lobste.rs | | [2]: https://tade.link | | [3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia- | sf@lis... for example | | [4]: https://getaether.net/ | | [5]: https://lemmy.ml/ | floren wrote: | Your mention of NNTP reading/posting caught my interest, but | I wasn't able to find any mention of it on tade.link; is that | perhaps a now-deprecated feature, or is it just not | documented? | nirvdrum wrote: | I really miss NNTP. I appreciate that spam was a huge | problem, but it was really nice being able to discover and | subscribe to a large number of topics and navigate them all | from the same tool. And there was innovation in the client | space. | | Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. | But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as | unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I | simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every | day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord | or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, | but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load | channels from each server. | | As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few | communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor | tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there | isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities | more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than | something like IRC. | notriddle wrote: | Is there a reason why Discourse's email notifications | aren't helping? | int_19h wrote: | I would argue that "modern UX expectations" is a large part | of the problem with Discourse. Infinite scrolling is one | prominent example. Wasteful whitespace is another. | dreyfan wrote: | I've yet to see a forum software that works as well as | vBulletin and the clones of that did in the early to mid 2000s. | Everything today is this weird "conversation" view and | comments/threads constantly move around based on the whims of a | voting audience. | RHSeeger wrote: | vBulletin is still available, isn't it? | dreyfan wrote: | Yep, works great. Nobody uses it for anything new though. | PeterCorless wrote: | https://xenforo.com/ -- Paradox Interactive uses it for their | Stellaris/HOI4/EU4/CK3 communities. | | edit: e.g., | https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa- | universal... | buro9 wrote: | I have something in Go that isn't too bad... it looks like | this https://www.lfgss.com and powers sites like this | http://forum.espruino.com/ | | Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side | though... it was designed as a platform rather than a | standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are | sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which | is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the | moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no | database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly | porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to | use. | einpoklum wrote: | So why not continue using it today, until something better | comes along? | int_19h wrote: | It's not "web 3.0" ~ | [deleted] | cmroanirgo wrote: | Not exactly sure what your requirements are but vanilla forums | have a clean look, mobile friendly, and have pretty good | customization. (Not sure if the latest version supports digest | emails though) | | https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla | julianlam wrote: | Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla, | Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the | forum game. | | The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I | see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work | better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to | today. | | We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years | ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software | to really make it the best offering out there | | I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :) | lxe wrote: | Or something like StackOverflow | secondcoming wrote: | SO is great except for all the wrong and stale answers | mooreds wrote: | ding ding ding! | | Only issue with SO is that you (as a company or community) | don't have as much control. That may or may not be an issue | depending on goals. | paxys wrote: | What forum though? An intuitive, modern, free, fully managed | forum software is non-existent. | rweichler wrote: | Best thing I ever did for EQE is shut down the Discord. Insane | waste of my time. Now the only way to reach me is via email or | the forum on https://eqe.fm | blitzar wrote: | Still a link to discord that still exists ... | [deleted] | bovermyer wrote: | There are quite a few forum options out there. Maintaining them | is much more time intensive than operating a Slack or Discord | group, though. | [deleted] | Karrot_Kream wrote: | Setting up a Discourse seems pretty easy from what I can tell. | Seems like it's as easy as setting up a cloud instance and | running a docker container. | rightbyte wrote: | Not if you count the time needed to man the channel for it to | be useful, though. | pavel_lishin wrote: | I agree with the fact that Slack/Discord are terrible for | keeping track of things long-term, but I will say that once | you've set Discord/Slack up and running, operating it is | typically pretty smooth - you've already likely got Slack and | Discord running, and you can check it every so often. | | Granted, things can completely explode, and moderation is | _still_ a requirement, but that 's true of forums as well. | | (Although due to their async nature, things boil over much | more slowly, and it's typically easier to just put the entire | forum or a user into a timeout.) | [deleted] | nicce wrote: | Slack or Discord live in the current moment. It is hard to get | back into discussion which started a week ago. Channels do not | provide much historical value. | pavel_lishin wrote: | It's virtually _impossible_ to do so in Slack, unless someone | ponies up the cash, which is not viable for very large | slacks. | stavros wrote: | It's very easy to do in Zulip, though, due to it being | threaded-only and having great UX. | kobieyc wrote: | We use Discourse's hosted solution and it's effectively zero | maintenance | ipaddr wrote: | Why not use a facebook page? Super easy to maintain and some | moderation | SXX wrote: | Discourse does need a server and it's resource-hungry, but I | cant say there any problem in maintaining it at all. Yeah, once | in a few months it's worth to check for spam notifications and | click to upgrade. | | But overall all you need to do is setup it properly once and | configure some backups sync. | | Again, you need to pay like $10-15 / month for server to host | it and backups. | badwolf wrote: | This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on | the desktop" | | Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure | that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. | Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. People are | comfortable using them. They provide a more uniform experience | across different servers/subreddits/etc... | Karrot_Kream wrote: | I agree, and I think OSS projects should learn from these | commercial successes and use their learnings to feed into OSS | product experiences. But to some extent, Discord and Slack are | both quite new. They were obviously quite successful at | encouraging people to sign-up. There must be something there | that makes Discord or Slack seem more trustworthy than "random | weird site". | htns wrote: | The only time I tried to use Discord it demanded I send them my | government ID. | einpoklum wrote: | > Nobody wants to register on some random weird site | | 1. It's the project's web forum. https://forums.fooproject.org/ | . Not random at all. If you're lucky, your registration for | fooproject works for the forum as well. | | 2. Well, we don't like registering with a large corporation | either. | | > and figure that sites navigation, | | Suppose it's a web forum, one of the trusty varieties from the | 2000's. What's there to figure out? The exact placement of | settings in the user profile pages? You'll live. | | > let alone their privacy/data policies. | | In this day and age, the effective assumption is: It's all | potentially public and the US government keeps a copy forever. | Wish it were otherwise. | | ... and actually, the privacy is typically better on smaller | independent platforms than on large ones. The large ones are | probably already hooked up to the NSA, while for the smaller | ones it's just a potential. | | > Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. | | Slack is a painful experience, and not even that easy . | | Reddit... yes, but there's not much of a UI to be difficult. | | Discord - I have almost no experience with it TBH. | | > People are comfortable using them. | | No, they're not. Some are. Those who aren't, tend not to use | them unless they have to. | | > They provide a more uniform experience across different | servers/subreddits/etc... | | A web forum is a pretty uniform thing. I hope you're not | complaining that not all forums are controlled by some huge | single company... | mooreds wrote: | > Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, | | Simple fix: add login with google/github. | | Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick | response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not | so great. | | Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of | the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else | owns that content/SEO value. | Ekaros wrote: | I don't want that either. Why should I tell google or github | which sites I use... And tie also the accounts there to my | google account. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | "I don't want that either." | | Then use a password manager. Pick your poison. | | Thats how we end up with apps without passeords, with just | phone number/sms verification | mooreds wrote: | This is what openid (the original) was designed to fix. You | get to own your identity and delegate it if desired. But | adoption didn't really happen. | | But I get it. Maybe a throwaway email address is the right | way around it for you? | klyrs wrote: | "Throwaway email address" has gotten a lot tougher in the | last 10 years. It's not impossible, but many providers | demand a phone number or email verification. The ones who | don't are used by bots, so those email addresses aren't | universally accepted by sites that require email | verification. | ipaddr wrote: | Most board software follows a simple tree layout. Not hard to | navigate. | | No one wants to register for slack or hand over government id | for discord or use the reddit app. | jimkleiber wrote: | I agree and I've been wondering, why doesn't someone make | something like a Discord/Discourse hybrid? Guilded has forum | channels and yet it misses so many of the bells and whistles | for moderation and discoverability that Discourse has. | | Basically, I want a Discord-type app, with it's UI and one | login, and then blended with the Discourse forum power. | majormajor wrote: | Do you think we should replace HN with discord or slack? | johng wrote: | Xenforo is excellent forum software. | blitzar wrote: | Reddit + discord + github. | | Be active and push real issues and bugs into the github channel | and use the content of forum / chat for documentation / faq / | guides. | dsfasdklgjalkj wrote: | People say it's hard to create a forum, but for software projects | there's one built right into Github - Github issues. Yet so many | times I see Github issues answered with "We answered this in | Discord. Go check there." Then there's other projects where | they're super anal about opening any Github issue, yet are happy | to answer the exact same question in Slack. | | Github issues has really really great SEO. If you answer | questions there, your users will find it. | wintermutestwin wrote: | For knowledge sharing purposes chat is way too ephemeral. | | Forums have an ephemerality too as threads get too cluttered or | buried under new threads. When an old thread takes too long to | find or filter through, new ones are created and then redundancy | sucks up everyone's time. | | The answer is moderation - preferably with "elected" moderators. | The other key is to have a system of escalation of key knowledge | to a Wiki, which again needs moderation in the form of reviews to | keep the knowledge up to date. | rexreed wrote: | YES - I hope we see a return to mid-2000s approaches for web | applications across the board. I'll take 2008 Google Maps over | 2021 Google maps. Heck, I'll take 2008 Google SEARCH over 2021 | Google Search. Things have regressed over the past decade. | thih9 wrote: | > Why do people use Slack/Discord/etc? | | One reason seems missing: chat is arguably easier to set up and | maintain. | | Synchronous communication also means that messages won't pile up. | | No past content means fewer places to keep up to date; plus there | are always users who ask questions without reading existing | topics. | | I could give more examples; to me chat seems a more lean | approach. | kayodelycaon wrote: | I've tried to use forums so many times but I just can't use them | effectively. I don't want to create accounts and get the | notification settings correct so I don't have to log in to see | replies to my messages without getting spammed. | | The only forum I've had success with as a user is Reddit. It | isn't the best forum software in the world but it is miles better | than the usual php bulletin boards. | | Having run a forum before, it's so much work to keep anything | secure and spam-free. I had to geo-ip block all of France and | Russia just to stay above water. I gave up. | Fellshard wrote: | Format migration seems to me to be a key feature - the ability to | lift ephemeral discussions into more permanent and deliberate | mediums as required. Something like chat -> forum -> wiki, for | example. Have set processes in place for determining when | something can usefully be pushed upwards. Also encourage a | culture of pointing to documentation /first/ to ensure the more | permanent documents are well-maintained and robust. | | Stack Overflow got close to this, but is still quite a ways off. | The chat element is present but very much cut off from the site, | and it lost its way over time as its focus changed. It may be | worthwhile trying to assemble recommendations for how to select | your own tools that give you these benefits, and perhaps to ease | migrations between them. | hartator wrote: | What about an issue-only GitHub public repo? | api wrote: | The problem with self-hosted forums is that you have to host | them, and that adds Yet Another Thing already overworked | developers and maintainers have to worry about. | | Self-hosting will not make a comeback until hosting software can | be installed and maintained as easily as, say, mobile apps. | Install a forum on your server, set an upgrade policy, and mostly | forget about it. | | So much developer work goes into overwrought boil the ocean | attempts at decentralization when solving this boring-but-hard | problem well could lead to a renaissance in the simplest and yet | most robust and most accessible form of decentralization: people | hosting shit themselves. Docker could have done this but really | didn't. RedHat or Ubuntu could do it, but they're not. Nobody is | really doing this, or if they are they are doing it in an overly | complicated way. | KennyBlanken wrote: | Installing a web forum is one click in damn near any web | hosting/VPS provider's admin panel... | api wrote: | What about updating it? What happens if you need to move it? | What happens if something breaks? Who fixes it? Who monitors | it? | ejj28 wrote: | I find googling for existing answers on forums, StackOverflow and | Reddit to be great resources when I need to solve a problem, but | I really dislike asking questions myself on those kind of | platforms. I hate having to write a formal post and then hope | someone responds, and then if anyone responds the conversation | slowly crawls along post by post. | | When I need help, I greatly prefer more casual, real time | environments like Discord. To me, asking on forums feels like | posting a newspaper ad for help and hoping someone mails me a | letter, compared to asking on Discord feeling like walking into a | room of knowledgeable people and discussing my question face to | face. | cletus wrote: | I like the idea of Discord in general. It certainly does have | uses like making voice communication more accessible. | | But I think I must be in the small minority who thinks that | Discord UI/UX is beyond terrible and Discord is nothing more than | a terrible walled garden where none of the content has any | discoverability. | | One thing we've learned in the last few decades is that | hierarchical organization doesn't work. This was obvious in the | days of the Yahoo Directory and probably long before. Trees are | bad tools for humans to organize things because the mental model | you have for how to organize things is likely not obvious to | other people so to use your hierarchy requires users to take on | and unfamiliar and opaque organization structure. | | This is why tagging is so much better. | | Think of something as simple as organizing an MP3 library. Is it | Artist -> Album -> Song? What about year? What about artist type? | You see how quickly it breaks down. | | Discord channels are a hierarchy. | | So for a developer or project Discord, what should your channels | be? #bug-reports, #suggestions, #feedback? Well already you've | run into problems as a given submission might be more than one of | these. Or it might apply to a particular major version and | someone might only be interested in those posts. | | Furthermore, every time I try and do anything in Discord, I can | never intuit my way to it. I have to google it almost without | exception. There are multiple places where settings are, all on | different parts of the screen. | | I tried to use a personal Discord to organize select information | from multiple other Discords. There's functionality, for example, | to follow a given channel... except some owners disable that (it | seems?). | | So I'd go wider than the developer community: don't use Discord | for anything that's meant to be discoverable or searcchable or | you're going to have a bad time. | pavel_lishin wrote: | I wish I remembered what it was I was searching for, but I found | a github issue where a repo admin directed folks to some chat | website about a year ago; naturally, in the year 2021, the whole | thing was completely defunct, and more recent threads pointed | people to Discord. | | I wonder what'll happen next year, if/when the Discord community | fractures, or starts making certain channels private, or it's | just abandoned and closed down. | johnebgd wrote: | I remember when I used IRC to speak with developers of | products. Everything felt temporary. I wonder if I still have | any of the MIRC logs hanging out in a backup somewhere... | muglug wrote: | Slack developer here, views are my own. | | Prior to Slack I spent many years as an OSS maintainer. I also | participated in a Slack channel that discussed my OSS tool's | general problem space. That Slack workspace was on the free plan, | so messages older than 6 months were memory-holed. | | In practice that wasn't too big of an issue. Most developers | understood that GitHub was the place for concrete actionable | things and long-term discussions, whereas Slack was the place to | build relationships and address burning questions quickly. Most | developers understood this distinction, though occasionally some | would have to be steered towards GitHub when discussing potential | bugs that benefitted a proper write-up. | | I also worked at a large company that paid for Slack, and it was | much more of a long-term memory resource. But as always, whenever | I found myself repeatedly searching in the message history for a | particular piece of information it always made sense to put it | somewhere more defined -- in a readme or some other sort of | document. | | At Slack we have the same basic breakdown -- Slack (the software) | provides a really useful context for why certain decisions were | made, and in a pinch the search feature is great for finding | particular nuggets of information, but that doesn't stop us using | Quip, GitHub and Jira for tracking longer-lived information. | dangus wrote: | The poll results show the real sentiment, that close to 30% of | people actually like synchronous chat. That is a significant | chunk. | | Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both | excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication. | | I could see potential for a feature in a chat program where a | message or series of messages could be selected and enshrined in | a search engine-indexed synchronous knowledge base page, working | something like a more powerful version of a pin in Slack or | Discord. | | Overall, though, I felt like the article was kind of bossy. | wvenable wrote: | Who are these people and how do they have time follow | synchronous chat on deep technical products all day? | iamstupidsimple wrote: | No data to back this up, but I have a feeling the industry is | so bottom-heavy with juniors that we've started optimising | towards their immediate need to learn. Juniors don't have a | problem sitting in Slacks all day. | vegai_ wrote: | >Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both | excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication. | | Basecamp? | JasonFruit wrote: | The poll is not exactly lined up with the point, though: it | says that people _want_ synchronous chat, while the article | says synchronous chat is not beneficial to the community. Both | can be true. | km3r wrote: | Yeah I could see in a few year Discord/Slack having "chat" | channels, voice channels, and "forum" channels. Maybe even add | in wikis, or dashboards. | JoshTriplett wrote: | > Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both | excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication. | | The Rust community has had great luck with Zulip for that. It | works well live, as well as asynchronously, and the content | remains useful and findable later. | | (We _also_ have forums, which serve a different purpose (longer | content), as well as GitHub.) | ljm wrote: | What if you don't need a community? Why does everything have to | be a community now? | | To that point: slack/discord/irc/whatsapp/pub conversations are a | great way to bootstrap a community before you invest in something | longer term, if it's needed. Find your like-minded friends and | then grow it out. | | In fact, I can use my own experience in the mid-2000s as an | example: we used existing forums like Gamesradar and rllmuk and | neogaf to bootstrap our offshoot forums. Most failed, some | succeeded for a while (one was PoopGang IIRC). | | Discord servers aren't really so different from that. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | "Why does everything have to be a community now?" | | It always did. The key is searchability - you can find | discussions through Google and they will have an answerr to | your question | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | Discord is great for developers who provide support, because all | incoming issues are instantly drowned in the noise, and you can | pretend that they don't exist. | einpoklum wrote: | My stance on interaction mechanisms "to support developer | community": | | For any project size: | | 1. Issue tracker. | | 2. Mailing list (or similar mechanism) for announcements (not | discussions with the users). | | For a larger project: | | 3. Forums | | 4. IRC/Matrix channel for chatting ... if core developers are | chatty enough to sustain this. | | For an even larger project: | | 5. A publicly-editable wiki and/or a Q&A platform | | 6. Multiple chat channels, mirroring them on different chat | platforms | | I'm not saying nothing else works, only that this ladder seems to | work well on the projects I have encountered. | CreepGin wrote: | It seems to me Github Discussions does the job for a forum (for | open source devs at least). Are there significant advantages to | setting up a standalone forum suite like Discourse? I imagine you | do have to spend quite a bit of resources to setup and maintain | such thing. | dmart wrote: | No, please don't. I don't want to make a separate account for a | random forum, and I especially don't want to use Discourse. | | Just use GitHub Issues and Discussions, please - it's so much | simpler for everyone. | faeyanpiraat wrote: | It seems like you need a new service to create accounts | seamlessly /s | novocaine wrote: | Dev _teams_ also benefit a lot from having an async way to | discuss bigger issues that require thoughtfulness and long form | answers, especially remote teams. There 's a reason mailing lists | are still somehow alive and well in open source projects that | have been remote first for decades. | | We're using discourse internally for this (in conjunction with | matrix) and it's allowed us to have discussions I don't think we | would have otherwise had. | monksy wrote: | When pushing instantaneous forms first and async forms second, | you're creating a barrier from moving the conversation over. | a-dub wrote: | i've always felt like synchronous chat was best for operations, | incident response and realtime help where long form | communications like forums and listservs are best suited for | deeper discussions and designs. chat can be fun, but it's really | lossy! | monksy wrote: | The discord/slack as a means of communicating technical questions | is a great example how an entire generation refused to accept a | solid solution because it didn't fit their impediment desire. | (Need is wavy here because the responsiveness isn't the original | need.. it's the answering of the question that's a need.. being | instanteous is just a convenience ) | | What am I saying: We've had technical mediums to discuss | technical problems asyncly for a while now. (Usenet, reddit, | phpbb, hackernews) Instead lots of younger people in the industry | decided they weren't obligated to use those and foolishly decided | to move to a more transient form of communication for everything. | | In doing so we're losing technical knowledge, misinformation is | spreading, and we're running into development of technology that | has a limited set of experience behind it. | | What I suggest: Figure out how to enhance async communication to | switch to syncronous and store the results of that. (in other | words identify deficiencies and try to solve the problems there | rather than completely scrapping them) | dragontamer wrote: | I mean, a lot of developers used IRC as far back as I can | remember? | | Forums are newer than IRC chat, though arguably Forums are | based on USENET, BBS, or email-lists. | | ------- | | IRC / Discord / Slack / Skype are real-time communication / | instant messenger style communications. | | Email / Forums / USENET / Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Hacker | News are async and slow. | monksy wrote: | IRC adoption never really peaked like slack and discord has | throwawaycuriou wrote: | If conversation threading were enforced adequately in a | Slack/Discord, a bot could watch threads for a heuristic of | usefulness and kick off the archival of some form of read-only | SEO-happy forum-like store. | 323 wrote: | To paraphrase an old saying, there are two kinds of community | software: the ones everybody complains about (Discord, Slack), | and the ones no one uses (forums, IRC). | mooreds wrote: | Author here. Thanks for submitting! | | I wrote this a year ago as my employer was starting up their | forum[0]. While we have since added slack, the forum is the main | support mechanism for our community (people who pay us money get | support tickets). | | I still stand by that choice for: * SEO * | durability * question quality | | I can't recall the exact numbers, but something like 5-10% of our | overall traffic is to the forum. | | 0: https://fusionauth.io/community/forum/ | dzonga wrote: | FusionAuth is a pleasure to work with. Thanks for the work and | documentation :+1. You folks done saved me a lot of time, | hopefully if I make a dollar will pay it forward. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-08 23:00 UTC)